We've been leaning on the golden oil of the Mediterranean too hard, and for too long. Today, it's time to pick up a bottle of something else.

I think you're using too much olive oil.

I don't know for sure, of course, because in all likelihood you and I have never met. But I don't need to know you to know that you use too much olive oil, because everybody, everywhere, is using too much olive oil. I think we'd all be better off if we stop.

My reasoning is not environmental (there's no olive oil shortage, at least not that I know of). It's not even based on the recent stories of olive oil fraud (though that's certainly annoying). Instead, I base this argument on the simple fact that cooks who lean too hard on olive oil are...boring.

This is not your fault. A decades-long campaign by everybody from olive oil councils to Rachael Ray would have you believe that olive oil is a great everyday cooking fat. This is false. The flavor of olive oil is too distinctive, the smoke point is too low.

Let's dig in to that first point a little more: Olive oil should taste spicy or grassy or floral, and it should always have, somewhere in there, the flavor of fat, juicy olives. It's a flavor that goes well with garlic and tomatoes and fresh cheeses. But if you're using olive oil to pull off a weeknight stir-fry—and you are, I know you are!—you are probably pairing together flavors that don't necessarily match.

A better oil for the stir-fry might be coconut oil, which contributes a subtle sweetness that feels at home with a lot of East Asian cooking. I've also been using coconut oil in baking—I like it in my no-recipe-required granola—and when I'm toasting grains, such as rice or bulgur.

But coconut oil would not have been right when, a few nights ago, I cooked down a pot of cabbage. Then again, olive oil didn't feel right, either. So I reached into my freezer and unearthed a tub of pork lard—I wanted a rich, piggy flavor in my cabbage (bacon fat would have been better, but I had none).

Two years ago I would have reached for olive oil for all of these applications—granola, rice, cabbage. And everything would have been fine. Nobody would have spit the food out. But because I now take the .2 seconds required to think about what fat would taste best with my food, my cooking is arguably, oh, 123% better.

Now, the second point—the smoke point, as it were. Olive oil's smoke point—that is, the temperature at which the oil breaks down and starts smoking—is notoriously low. In fact, if you look at this handy chart by the folks at Serious Eats, you'll see that it's at the very bottom. You might also note that the smoke points of coconut oil and butter aren't that much higher.

But move your eyes up the chart and you start getting into all kinds of interesting fats. Duck fat. Grapeseed oil. My beloved lard. Each one contributes a unique flavor—or, in the case of grapeseed, canola, and vegetable oils, a clean, neutral flavor—and a smoke point that's high enough for you to really get a hard sear on that steak/pork chop/skin-on salmon.

Just having three of the oils from that list on hand would give you a good arsenal to work with. I'd choose coconut; something neutral like grapeseed or a good, cheap vegetable oil; and, yes, olive oil. What, you didn't think I'd left olive oil for dead, did you? Just the opposite. Now that I don't use it all the time, I've grown to appreciate it even more.